Thoughts "Thoughts are essential as they are the communication with our home." On Happiness The key to happiness equals enlightenment. Maintaining permanent happiness is difficult. We struggle with everyday life and rather tend to give in to the lazy feeling of “just not bothered today”. I tend to struggle with mood swings that either catapult me straight up to an incredible high from which the world seems small and not a problem at all but soon I drop down again and can’t seem to see the woods for the trees. After years of trying to remain happy with various methods and different mind sets I have stumbled across the key to happiness. And quite frankly, I’m wondering why I didn’t see it before. It was just there, in a little enlightened moment. It is not about mastering to be continuously happy, which is way too exhausting and doesn’t last very long. The key is to remain neutral, in balance, and happiness will come all on its own quite easily. Of course, to begin with you will slip back into a fit of rage quite easily the next time something upsets you, but try to recognize this emotion and instead of trying to suppress your anger, just let it emerge, recognize it, accept it and get back into your neutral space. Enjoy this gorgeous and yet simple feeling of happiness! On Belief What do we believe if we don’t know what to believe in anymore? Do we desperately turn to the least likely and trust blindly what it makes us believe or do we completely withdraw from everything, criticising the unproven? Belief is such a vague entity. If you try to grasp it, it will vanish into thin air. If you try to prove it, you will come to realize that it is none-existent. Our beliefs are mainly established during early childhood, influenced strongly by our parents and other close family members and then shaken by teachers and most importantly by the pressure that our fellow peers put on us. That is the time where we start to question, to form our own beliefs. This belief can change any given time. It is subject to coincidences, accidents, any life changing event that makes us re-think. Interestingly these are usually low moments in life where we question the meaning of life and our purpose here. Some will see no way for them to carry on. Some will cling to any glimpse of hope. This is where we tap into a new aspect of life where we are prone to accept anything that will give us a reason to live. Now, think. Sometimes we want to believe so badly that anything will do just to give us a sense of being alive, a sense of who we are. But it is equally important to find a common ground to base our beliefs on, to not just accept anything, but to question as we go along. Only one answer won’t give you what you were looking for. Look for the opposing answer, then think again. What about the power of belief that moves mountains? I am very critical yet open minded, I naturally question everything. I want to know all the answers but at the same time I am drawn to the fascinating world of the unknown. I have, or “believe” to have seen and experienced a few things that can not be explained rationally. Also, I have come to the understanding that our mind is stronger than our personal will. If you fully believe, think again! Don’t just follow. Find your own way! Questioning is healthy! I remain neutral. I won’t give you the answer, but encourage you to find it yourself. I don’t want people to follow something that promises them paradise after death - I want to encourage them to find it themselves. We keep searching for answers all over the world – in religions, in people, in places – but forget to look inside us first. The path to enlightenment is the path of learning, understanding and experiencing. On Nutrition After years of battling with an unhealthy relationship to food and a persistent “not feeling well”, I finally discovered that I had indeed developed an intolerance to some products, mainly to those I used to consume excessively. These were mainly sugar, yeast, wheat and milk with the result of me reacting to many products containing at least one of these ingredients with headache, tiredness, irritability, stomach pain, acne, frequent urination and simply feeling ill. After a month’s detox I began yet another foot battle because it is one thing to decide to change one’s diet but another to convince your body to go without all the nice comfort food that it has become so well used to. Suddenly I didn’t know what to eat anymore. There was sugar and milk in absolutely everything. Even ordinary vegetable stock contained milk and yeast! A year on I’m only just starting to get the hang of it. Although I have been cooking with fresh ingredients for many years, now I got into the habit of preparing basically everything from scratch. I cut out all sugar, replacing it with natural sweeteners, use soya milk instead of cow’s milk, eat cereals instead of bread and discovered the fantastic world of raw chocolate. In developing an understanding of the damaging influence of sugar, especially the processed and refined sucrose, and becoming aware of what reaction certain by products can have on the body without having any benefits at all, it helped me to see the whole food industry in a completely different light. Food loses many of it’s nutrients during repeated heating processes. The mass production of cheap ready made meals and pleasure foods available in supermarkets has absolutely nothing to do with nutrition at all. Food is supposed to provide essential nutrition for the body in order for it to function properly in all daily activities. However, what most food does nowadays is to play with your metabolism by raising and dropping your sugar levels almost at will, using the body’s natural storage capability to fill it up with artificial fats, flavours, colourings and preservatives and adding the damaging and highly addictive sucrose sugar to absolutely everything for a better taste and to make us want more and more of it and we believe in all the adverts that tell us that we need candy bars and sweets to make us feel better. Noticing this and all the other side effects from general feelings of being unwell, allergies, tooth decay and chronic diseases up to diabetes and obesity, is the first step towards a new you. It is up to you to what level you want to take it. If you are happy with what you eat, carry on. You don’t need to become a health fanatic but I would like to raise your awareness to what you eat. Think twice what you take in and try to avoid unnecessary additives. You are what you eat. Eat simple, unprocessed and unrefined. On the Environment Is it really necessary to cut down trees only because their roots upset the pavement? What came first? Trees or pavements? Why doesn’t anyone consider to remove some of the stones around the tree to allow space for growth? The human race is very selfish in thinking that it is a catastrophe when nature goes it’s way. When the sea claims back the land, a hurricane sweeps over the country, volcanoes erupt and earthquakes split the ground we forget that it has done that for millions of years. In fact it has done so a long time before humans were walking the earth. And even if this may sound rather harsh I would like you to consider that it is your own decision to build right next to the sea, your responsibility to settle right on the ridge of a tectonic plate and if we continue to treat the planet as we do it will only get worse. So the next time you see a tree trying to find space for it’s roots, consider to make space instead of treating trees as the evil cause of uneven pavements. Because we can’t live without trees, but we will manage perfectly fine without pavements. On Religion Everybody needs to believe in something to give life a sense. So, is it just to fill that gap in me that I believe in what I do believe? How can I be sure about all that what I think is right to be true? There are so many different belief systems in the world. Some even kill others and themselves to show that their religion is the one and only. I see that the thing some may name God or Allah or Buddha is in everything. There is one thing that all religions have in common and that is love. The word love appears in all religions because love is what everyone is looking for. My question is why can’t there be such thing like acceptance for each other for we are all made of unconditional love created by our very own creator? Is it necessary to convince someone of one’s own truth without being able to prove that it really is the truth? One should be happy to find love in one’s religion and allow others to find love in whatever system they may believe in. On Life and Death During my work in a nursing home I could never quite get over the question what purpose there is in someone who is classed as confused, incontinent and immobile with hearing and visual impairment, practically incapable of doing anything for themselves, requiring full time care. Certainly it can’t be justified to say that this person is a waste of space. There are human rights that tell us to respect each individual and give all care in a dignified way. But where is the dignity and respect in regard to that person not wanting to live anymore? It is against the law to aid death, even if the person requests it. Those who decide over another’s life are usually the relatives, husband or wife, brothers and sisters, daughters and sons, who don’t want to accept that it is the end, by stating that they want resuscitation by any means in order to prolong that life a little bit longer. No body asks the poor soul in that body if it can stand the pain and if it would like to stay a bit longer or if it has learned enough and would like to go home. It is being forced to carry on with pain or without by loving relatives who can’t say goodbye but who mostly wouldn’t or couldn’t care for it either. So it spends the last months of it’s life alone in it’s room with carers who are always busy only stopping by to give the standard care, food and drinks. When will we realise that in some cases we have to accept the end and move on. It is not up to us to decide to artificially prolong life, but still we do. Instead we ought to be allowed to end our lives when we are ready and really can’t find anymore sense in life. But by law, this is not granted. Is death really that bad that we have to do everything we can to keep someone alive even if they want to die? Who says that death really is the end? Due to drastic improvements in medicines, more and more people report so called near death experiences(NDE). Advances in medical science and the fact that more people die in hospitals rather than at home means that more people are being successfully resuscitated and therefore more likely to experience a NDE. In 1937, an anonymous physician described his NDEs but was worried about the effect of going public. Until today, death is still the ultimate taboo. Billions are spend on keeping dying patients alive for a few extra days or weeks, prolonging their agony in exchange for a few precious moments of life. Because life is everything and death is seen as the ultimate full stop. Those that had been clinically dead and who brought back clear memories of what was going on around them suggests that consciousness might not be located in the brain. So, if our consciousness and awareness of who we are isn’t located in the brain is there a chance that it also doesn’t die with the brain? This is the crux of the near death experience debate. Are those reporting tunnels, beings of light, meeting deceased relatives simply recounting fantasies brought on by medications or brain chemicals or the body’s natural reaction to trauma? Whether it is real or not, if death is good or bad is not the final question. Certainly, we have free will and the choice to come back or stay away, don’t we? If only our physical body remains, maintained by machinery, where are we? Do we really want to go back into a body that doesn’t function properly anymore. A “vehicle” that we can’t control anymore? There must be something better than being held prisoner in a shell. I do have to point out here that I don’t look at individuals but generally at the question why we are to artificially prolong life but not help those with a terminal disease who are well aware that their condition will stop them from carrying on their normal life and that due to these circumstances they do not want to carry on living. Another issue would certainly be the soul purpose and the general growth by experience of a soul. There a plenty of things to consider but none of them will justify the suffering of a human being which is bed bound, in pain, unable to move any part of the body apart from facial expressions and hushed words which clearly state she doesn’t want to live anymore.